The Mana World Forums

Different human skin tones have been planned since pretty much the beginning of TMW, but for various graphics-related reasons they were never implemented. IMO this has become one of the areas where the game really shows its age. I also think that continuing to treat this as a low priority issue will only lead to us having this discussion again in another 10 years. For any MMO in 2023 it should be high priority to have some form of racial equality in the "human" race. Especially given the fact that over the years many non-human races have been developed with a higher priority than real non-white humans.

I'm white, so I can only imagine how annoying it must feel to get to the character creation menu and finding out that I must be a different race and there is no way at all to make the character resemble myself. It must be alienating for many potential new players and it certainly isn't a good look for TMW itself. It's one criticism for which I can find no excuse. It must be fixed.

So, with all that said I'm calling on every past, present and future graphic artist to try to do something about this. The main issue in the past has been to make these skin tones look good, but with all the wonderful things that have been made for TMW (including many alternative races) I cannot believe that it is still impossible to make a good looking dark-skinned human.

The most basic version of what we need is 2 extra skin tone options, essentially light brown and dark brown. The goal here is not to represent every possible skin colour humans can have, but to give everyone something at least close. To this I would note that even white-skinned sprites aren't exactly the colour of human white skin, so we're definitely not going for hyper-realism.

I am posting in Home of Development because this is something that IMO should be of priority for all game projects and the resulting coloured sprites should be made available as a basic option in any TMW-related game.

P.S.
I've been urged to acknowledge Moubootaur Legends' efforts. There are different skin colours, but the recolour was not done properly and therefore ML can also benefit from this.

It would be something pretty easy to do with a simple palette shift but for that first we would have to limit the number of colors on our main player sprite.
I've been planning to do that to re-implement our races and skin tones in a better but it's a bit long to do it correctly without loosing any texture info from our current sprite.

I will give it a try later this month though!

Usually I'm against recoloring sprites, but this is one of the few exceptions where I do think it is an good idea .

Also whenever this get implemented, do not forget to also take a good look at the NPC's we have. This kind of thing isn't limited to player characters (though it's a good start I guess)

I'll state my opinion here as I did on IRC, for the record. I would stay away from anything in the real world if possible. Blue, green, red, whatever. If people prefer to have real world colors then we can just add art that is already made from other places. Should be as easy as adding the sprite sheet and XML and editing XML as required. Am I wrong?

Everything is inspired by the real world. In the game water is blue, the grass is green, the sky is blue, sand is yellow and humans (renamed recently to Talpan but still clearly the default human-looking sprite) are white. Just white.

We have more variety of colours for plants than for humans. It's actually quite unnatural and inconsistent.

The obvious reason is that the game was made by mainly white people, but it has to be alienating for non-white people just like non-green grass would be alienating to all of us.

I have some trouble to commit these sprites to SoM's git but here are the 3 versions with a reduced color palette

Sprites can be found here: https://gitlab.com/sourceofmana/sourceo ... es/players